1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a card connector and more particularly to a card connector capable of easily and effectively reducing overall size thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
To keep abreast with the rapid development of electronic and information technologies, consumer electronic products, such as mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and so on, have their market growth in greater amount every year and apparently become indispensable products and leading trend of the new era. When operated, these electronic products need to record and store text data, static image data or dynamic audio/video data through a storage card (memory card). Hence, currently, almost every electronic product is equipped with an electronic card connector to connect with external storage cards. As to the conventional card connectors in the market, irrespective of single card connectors or combo card connectors, they are all designed to have automatic card ejection mechanism therein for users to easily remove the storage cards inside the electronic card connectors.
As disclosed by Taiwan Utility Model Patent No. M393838, an electronic card connector has an insulation body, multiple conductive terminals, a shielding case, a card ejection mechanism and a resilient element. The conductive terminals are securely mounted on the insulation body. The shielding case is mounted on the insulation body. The card ejection mechanism is mounted on the shielding case and has a slider, a resilient element and a guiding rod. The slider is slidable with respect to the insulation body. The resilient element restores the slider back to an initial state with its elastic force. A first end of the guiding rod is mounted on the insulation body and a second end of the guiding rod serves for slider to move thereon. The slider has a heart-shaped slot for the second end of the guiding rod to move inside the heart-shaped slot. Accordingly, electronic cards can be inserted in and removed from the electronic card connector.
However, due to the heart-shaped slot of the slider, the conventional card connector becomes relatively bulky. The relatively bulky slider forces the insulation body to reserve a larger space for mounting the slider so that the overall size of the electronic card connector fails to be further miniaturized. Such failure certainly run counter to the universal design requirement of electronic products, that is, being compact, thin and lightweight. Besides, to prevent a fault caused by the guiding rod jumping out of the heart-shaped slot when being moved therein, the conventional electronic card connector usually has an elastic pressing plate mounted on the shielding case. As the elastic pressing plate is formed by a stamping process, its mechanical strength tends to be relatively low and a downward stress loaded on the elastic pressing plate surely increases. As a result, when the downward stress on the elastic pressing plate is excessively high, the guiding rod can be no longer operated smoothly and the electronic card connector is unable to be normally operated.